PPC (pay per click) is one of the most effective digital marketing techniques, it can quickly get you to the front page of Google, for a price. You can choose the audience you want to target and get your content to them in key positions in search and throughout the online universe.
One of the most common used would be google ads, although there are different platforms such as Microsoft ads, which ones you use all depends on where your organic mainly comes from and what audience you are trying to target.
First thing to consider are your keywords.
You need to make sure that you choose keywords that are relevant to your content and optimised so that they have the most volume capacity but with mid to low keyword difficulty. You can find this information by doing a keyword search. This can also provide you with additional keywords to target that you might not have thought of.
Next step would be to decide on the type of ad you’d like to run. Smart shopping campaign, display ad, video ads – they all have merit depending on the content available to you and your topic.
When setting up your ads it’s important to set your audience and your negative keywords to ensure that your ads don’t show next to unfavourable content.
Once your ads are up and running it’s important to keep an eye on the insights based on your primary goals, be it conversions, lead generation or new user awareness. With testing of setups you will be able to see what performs best and tweak them to best suit your goals.
In order to get the most out of your ppc you need to ensure your page authority and organic SEO is up to scratch, the algorithm for ppc rankings takes these things into account when choosing its ‘winners’.
For those who don’t know SEO stands for search engine optimisation and if you have a website in 2022 and aren’t looking into it, you may as well be carving your posts onto a cave wall.
A good SEO strategy is pivotal for improving traffic to your website. It helps users find your online content and increases the quality of your traffic, often leading to increased conversions.
By optimising your on site SEO you increase the likelihood of ranking highly in search engines, and with the increase of paid positions becoming ever expensive that is something every business should be striving to capitalise on.
Important factors to think about when working on your SEO strategy would be the quality and quantity of your organic traffic. By ensuring your content is relevant and informative you can provide authority to your website.
Gaining high levels of traffic, that don’t bounce straight off, is also vital. The higher the quality and quantity of your traffic – the higher you’ll rank in the SERPs (search engine results page).
There are many facets of SEO that need considered. On page, off page and technical SEO all need to have a place in a good SEO strategy.
Ideally a company would use a dedicated expert or agency to advise and optimise this for them as it can be very time consuming. Done incorrectly, it could cause the search engine to penalise your website by blocking it from there search results!
Finally, to answer the question of what is SEO and why do you need it? It is the way websites are ranked in search listings allowing people to find them online. If you want to be found and interacted with online without the exhaustive ad budget SEO is the way to roll.
Personally, getting into eCommerce was a complete accident of exploring options and just following through on whatever seemed interesting at the time. After an internship, I was taken on as a full-time employee. Did a lot of work on SEO and site optimisation, moved onto coding and user experience, and developed more using different tools and methods to improve websites as I went.
When I arrived in the industry it had already flourished, the ‘black hat’ days of SEO had been and gone and we had to actually work hard at getting sites to the top of Google. The more I have learned and progressed within this industry the more I see how important eCommerce has become to us all. No one buys things anymore without checking out the online reviews. No one just goes to the shop that’s closest to buy something now, we search for the best value. And Amazon has challenged everyone to go big or go home with their next-day delivery standard.
Whether you’re dipping your toe with a Facebook business page or learning to design your own website to sell you products or skills – eCommerce is as key to life now as the internet itself and to not jump on and learn is to be left in the dust.
The future of eCommerce
There are many highly intelligent and well-informed blogs out there that can tell you the ins and outs of eCommerce, the latest trends, the upcoming storms. There are scary stories of when sites have been hit by the latest Google algorithm, from which many normal people never actually figured out why their sites suddenly got shoved off the search. With these blogs and tools however you can learn how to appease the search machines and get the prime spots on their lists.
The future however is in eCommerce. If 2020 has shown us anything it is that when all else fails – we can get it online. Businesses that never touched these online tools were suddenly shut down to the world and forced to expand their reach to their customers using online tools and many found they’d been there waiting.
We like easy things, we like speed and after 2020 most of us like the safe distance that can be afforded by ordering online.
The majority of what there is to learn about eCommerce and how to action it is online. We’re a chatty bunch and generally, we do give away our secrets for site views and high online interaction. If you have time and interest the best way to progress in the future would be to explore website building, SEO, PPC, Social media advertising, and UX optimisation.
Very few business owners however would have time to obtain this knowledge and maintain their businesses. The future of eCommerce is the majority of businesses progressing to realise that they need to source this expertise to excel and they either need to gain this knowledge for themselves or hire someone that does.
In my opinion, the value that can be given to a brand through an online identity can be easily outlined and reported on to show the worth and benefits of hiring someone who knows what they’re doing, for small business owners however even a bit of online knowledge could make all the difference in the future.
As a culture, we need to learn to invest in ourselves and choose the right tools for our businesses. eCommerce wraps these needs up and packages the tools ready for the industries to embrace and grow.
The best use of social platforms would be to have a presence on all popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Pinterest. The key is to pick the platform that most suits your product and where your audience is.
When using multiple platforms however it’s important to tailor your content for each. If you know you’ll only have time to create content for one it’s better to make good content for the most suitable platform than spamming multiple platforms with inappropriate things.
For example – a grocery would potentially be able to get some fantastical fancy photos of fruits and veg that could be great on Instagram but the reach could be too wide and potentially not weld profit. On Facebook, however, you could target your fruit and veg to local groups, offer delivery, and promote via shares or paid targeted ads very easily. So show off the images on Instagram and Facebook but you may have to accept awareness from Instagram and conversion from Facebook.
Videos are one of the most popular and effective media online. If your product can be advertised via video get creative and show us what you’ve got!
Pinterest is a bit of an underrated platform but it is a growing media for businesses. It’s great if you have a website to link out to, just make sure what you posts link relevant pages or you risk search penalties.
Consideration should be very much towards whatever you are promoting. For example, if you are a florist take some pictures of those beautiful flowers. If you are a dog groomer get permission to share photos of your work, trying to start conversations, social media algorithms are very much about social interaction so if you get people to stop and look at your pictures and your videos then you can get more people to view them they will promote and advertise your post more.
Try and stay active, pages are more trusted if active, and get more social promotion from the algorithms because you’ll have more interactions. On Facebook desktop, you can schedule posts so you could schedule a few posts in the week in one day.
Make it fun, interesting, and interactive. Try things, if it doesn’t work don’t do that again. Make sure you keep an eye on your insights to see what’s performing well and what isn’t.
Finally, be mindful of what you post. Make sure it’s on brand and professional, while you can delete posts once it’s out in the world anyone can screenshot it and keep it for reposting. So be respectful and only post what is right for your brand.
What the hell is eCommerce? This was the question I had 8 years ago at the end of my university career. I had just wrapped up my degree and was looking for the next step in my life when I came across an opportunity to be an eCommerce intern at SportsDirect.
Now, considering I was doing a media production degree and specialising in design, looking back I can see that this was an odd choice in direction. The truth is at that point I had no idea what an eCommerce intern was and all the design firms I’d applied for had turned me down.
So, off I went into one of the oddest situations I have ever been in that included competition, house-sharing, and learning. If you think is going to dish the goods on SportsDirect and their inside story I’m afraid you’re out of luck. The times I saw Mike Ashley he was busy walking around the office with staff, wearing his SportsDirect polo, and was all-in-all very normal. If you look past him often arriving in his helicopter.
It was during this internship I was introduced to eCommerce and its many methods and strategies. In honesty, when I was trying to learn and figure out how to do the job in the beginning I wish someone had simply said this – eCommerce is the art of selling online.
In this blog, I will highlight the basics of eCommerce and social media, which go hand in hand, and what you should at least be aware of if you are thinking about entering this world of online madness.
eCommerce stands for electronic commerce. If you buy or sell anything over the internet you are part of this online machine. Depending on the company depends on the depth of the strategy being used to pull in more customers. Mainly what the teams will look at is the conversion funnel, they want to give you the right information and right hook at each stage of your shopping experience. There are numerous variations of the funnel but a standard one would be: Awareness, Interest, Purchase, Repeat.
You need to provide the right information for each stage of a customer’s journey otherwise they might not choose you as a buying option. So, say someone is thinking of buying a new car. First, they might research different types. If your site has lots of useful information, comparison features, and articles on what car is good for who – you increase the chances of your site creating hits in the initial research stage.
Next, interest. Once the users have a rough idea of what they want they’ll be looking at what is on offer. Do you have deals, how easy is it to access you, and how are you better than others to purchase from? Also, hardly anyone makes a purchase anymore without checking out at least a couple reviews.
Next, is a purchase, they’ve found you, found the product, decided on a model – what pushes them over the finish line? Good user experience and ease of use. If it’s tricky or complicated to buy people will bounce off your site so fast you wouldn’t believe it. It also needs to be secure, if your selling site doesn’t look secure then people will find it hard to part with their cash.
Finally – repeat. Once you’ve made a sale it’s important to provide good customer service, provide confirmation of purchase, up-to-date progress if your product is being delivered, and obtain permission to stay in contact with them. At the simplest, you should at least end the buying process on a confirmation landing page so the user knows that their order has been a success.
A big part of eCommerce is the optimisation of your online selling tool. For some this will be their website, allowing users to browse, buy and create an account for easy repeat purchases. It could be a selling platform such as eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. Or, alternatively, a lot of sellers are now selling their products directly on social media.
Each platform has a range of skills and methods you can use to optimise your sales. For websites, online optimisation through SEO, PPC, and ensuring accessibility can help you climb in Google’s rankings, leading to an increased chance of being searched and found online for your keywords.
Keywords are a huge help on selling platforms too if you don’t manage to highlight the right terms then even if a user does need your products/services it’s hard for them to find you. For example, If you’re targeting local customers but you don’t include your location, how will they find you?
Finally, social media has massively taken off in recent years and now everyone who wants to make money, be known, and sell online needs a social media presence. No presence now leaves customers unsure of your reliability and trustworthiness. There are ways to make money with and without spending money using social media as a selling platform, however, they make certain it’s slower to do it for free.
I am a digital professional who has held numerous digital positions over the last 8 years for some amazing brands.
Gaining experience in SEO, PPC, UX, analytics, CRM and content marketing. My aim is to continue learning in this ever changing digital environment and help those around me.
This includes sharing my years of experience in digital marketing, with the aim to help small businesses navigate this weird and wonderful world of e-commerce. Whether through quality content, consultations or audits I’m dedicated to providing expert digital support.
IV Digital 